A decline in voter turnout on college campuses may have cost Democrats a handful of House seats on Election Day.

In college towns from Durham, N.H., to Charlottesville, Va., and in university precincts as varied as Columbus, Ohio, and Syracuse, N.Y., a lack of campus enthusiasm appears to have contributed to the downfall of a group of House freshmen who rode into office in 2008 on Barack Obama’s popularity with students.

Consider Ohio: Two years ago, Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy rode the Obama campus wave to win the Columbus-based 15th District by 2,300 votes, ending more than 40 years of Republican control of the seat.

This year, however, Steve Stivers, the Republican she narrowly beat in 2008, trounced her by nearly 14 percentage points — about 30,000 votes.

The showing at the polls near Ohio State University was anemic: At four wards on or near the campus, turnout was just one-third of 2008 levels and about half of what it was in 2006, according to unofficial results. In the entire district, turnout was roughly 70 percent of 2008 numbers, according to unofficial returns.

That disappointing performance came not long after Kilroy shared the stage with Obama before 35,000 cheering fans at an OSU rally last month.

At the University of New Hampshire, the story wasn’t much different. Political activity before the election was described as “nonexistent.” And at the University of Illinois, students registered the lowest turnout in 24 years.

Nationwide, turnout among people 18 to 29 years old dropped to 20.9 percent this year, down from 23.5 percent in 2006, according to an estimate by Circle, a research group that tracks civic engagement of young voters. In 2008, about 51 percent of young people voted, mostly for Obama.

“For liberal students, this election felt, at best, as a defensive move, protecting a Congress they don’t like that much,” said Peter Levine, director of Circle.

That lack of fire helped cost first-term Rep. Tom Perriello (D-Va.) his 5th District seat, which includes the University of Virginia campus. In 2008, Perriello squeaked into office by 727 votes out of 317,000 cast. This time around, he lost by 9,000 votes.

While Obama’s last-minute appearance with Perriello at the university helped drive some students to the polls, the precinct with the most students had only 527 votes for Perriello this year, a far cry from the 977 who voted for him two years ago.

“If young people had showed up anywhere close to the 2008 proportions, Democrats would have lost fewer seats,” said Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia. “Certainly, it wouldn’t have been the 60-plus [seats] we see now.”

Voter turnout is always lower in midterm elections, and students are often too busy with school, work and other outside pursuits to give them their full attention. Still, youth vote advocates like Rock the Vote President Heather Smith warned that the Nov. 2 results showed the dangers of forgetting the young voters who helped put members of Congress into office in the first place.

Kilroy’s defeat in Ohio was partly the result of her failure to court the young voters who were essential to her survival, said Smith.

“There’s an example of someone who could’ve won,” Smith said, asking why candidates in districts with colleges used “angry attack ads” in their campaigns. “Young people aren’t angry. It’s not motivating [to them], not speaking to their issues. And not speaking to them.”

“You want to reach out to and engage young people, especially for these candidates who won on the backs of young voters in 2008,” Smith said, adding that it didn’t make sense “to then ignore that same group that puts you into office two years later, to be running a campaign that not only ignores them but in many ways turns them off.”

Brad Bauman, communications director for Kilroy’s campaign, said that the congresswoman had a “very aggressive campus outreach program” and that he hadn’t seen data suggesting negative ads discourage students from voting.

And Matt Caffrey, president of OSU’s College Democrats, flatly refuted the notion that Kilroy wasn’t visible enough on campus.

“That’s bull----,” he said, arguing that the congresswoman was a regular presence among her supporters at the school as far back as the spring. “In one week, I think she was in our office or at our meetings three or four times.”

The national climate stacked the odds heavily against Kilroy, said Paul Beck, a professor of political science at OSU.

“You can almost picture Rep. Kilroy standing there in these sort of gale-force winds trying to hold her ground and not being able to do it,” said Beck, who noted that Kilroy tied herself closely to Obama. “The fact that [Obama] was not on the top of the ticket hurt Democrats and hurt Kilroy in particular.”

In upstate New York, Democratic Rep. Dan Maffei may end up as another casualty of student apathy. He defeated his Republican opponent in 2008 by 13 points but is now trailing by 700 votes as absentee ballots begin to be counted amid a legal battle in the 25th District, which includes Syracuse University.

The absentee ballots in populous Onondaga County, which includes the school, will be counted this week, and precinct data aren’t yet available. The county broke in Maffei’s favor on election night by 8 points, a statistic his campaign uses as evidence that he’ll win when the tally is finished.

But that’s significantly lower than in 2008, when almost 39 percent more ballots were tallied than have been this year, and Onondaga voters gave Maffei a 15-point win over his GOP rival. A stronger university showing could have made the difference in such a razor-close race: Leading up to Election Day, students showed a “lot lower interest” than in 2008, which was “really quite noticeable,” said Grant Reeher, a Syracuse University political science professor.

“Political representatives who regard students as their base are going to be in a lot of trouble when they hit elections, where it’s tough to motivate them and turn them out,” Reeher said. “This was a classic case of it in 2010.”

In New Hampshire, where Rep. Carol Shea-Porter rode a Democratic wave to office in 2006 but lost badly to her opponent this month, the two-term congresswoman suffered a significant dropoff among students.

When Shea-Porter was reelected during the 2008 Obama surge, 4,715 people voted for her in Durham, the town that includes UNH. On Election Day 2010, that number fell to 2,510.

Andy Smith, director of the UNH Survey Center, described political activity on campus as “nonexistent.”

“There is absolutely no interest” at UNH, Smith said, adding that his students who are involved with the campus Democrats told him before the election that they were getting no business. “We have this idea that students are really interested in campaigns and elections, but for the most part, they don’t pay attention to this stuff.”

House campaigns weren’t alone in witnessing the campus dropoff: It was also noticeable in the Illinois Senate race. There, Obama’s old Senate seat fell into the hands of GOP Rep. Mark Kirk, who won handily in Champaign County, which includes the 41,000-student University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Though Obama carried the county when he won the seat in 2004, this year his preferred candidate, Alexi Giannoulias, lost to Kirk by 17 points.

At the 10 precincts that the Champaign County clerk describes as “entirely campus,” turnout was the lowest since 1986: just 1,676 votes, a world away from the 7,535 in 2008 and fewer still than the 2,615 in 2006.

“Virtually everything that drove college kids to turn out for Obama kind of got ignored,” said Champaign County Clerk Mark Shelden.